5 Tools for Increasing Productivity and Gaining Time

Posted by on Feb 24, 2014 in Productivity, Work | 4 Comments
5 Tools for Increasing Productivity and Gaining Time

Over the past month, I’ve been working on automating processes that I’d like to become regular and effortless. Here are some tools that I’ve discovered or been exposed to and have recently put to use:

Asana: Been using this for managing ALL of my tasks, projects, and turning ideas into action. I highly recommend doing a great big brain-dump into it and then prioritizing tasks that way. Also recommend putting all tasks that you have into it to keep track of everything.

Contactually: It pulls in ALL of your contacts from email, and social media networks and consolidates them. Then you can send group mails that look like individual ones, and set up email programs and check-ins with it. Powerful and useful!

If This, Then That (IFTTT): An amazeballs tool that you can use to connect different online services with each other. I just made a recipe for connecting Delicious with Buffer, so that I can save links to Delicious.com whenever I want, but Buffer will then only send out 5 tweets per day. So far, I have tweets for the next 2 weeks lined up. Yay!

Buffer: I’ve known about, but resisted Buffer for about 2 years, but I’m now very happily on board! I now have Tweets and some Facebook posts queued up to post at regular intervals. No more trying to remember to post things in a timely manner. The Buffer Blog is also well worth reading. Sign up for their emails, you’ll be glad you did.

Gmail Offline: I don’t know how I missed the memo on this one, but I’m REALLY glad that I got clued in! I’d been planning to start using Mac Mail so that I could access my email when I am traveling but have no internet access. Luckily, a friend suggested that I use Gmail Offline to do that and skip Mail altogether. I’m looking forward to having a way to get caught up with backed up email responses during long trans-continental and trans-atlantic flights!

Have you found any new tools that are helping you be more productive so that you can devote time to doing the work that you really want to do? If so, please share!

4 Comments

  1. Rasmus Mauria
    March 23, 2014

    Hi Denise

    Interesting list of tools, but I only see four tools on your list, where did the fifth one go?

    cheers,
    Rasmus

    Reply
    • Denise
      March 25, 2014

      Good catch, Rasmus! I’ve added a fifth: Gmail Offline. Do you have any other tools that you suggest I try out?

      Reply
  2. Jim
    March 26, 2014

    My favorite aspect of Contactually is when you use the iPhone or Android app as well. It pulls in your text contact rates and phone call logs by contacts. Contactually then creates a perfect picture of every single communication with the client. I LOVE that feature! Thank you for turning me onto Contactually; it’s making following up with leads and old contacts so much easier.

    Reply
  3. Bill
    August 8, 2014

    Hootsuite, LastPass and Kanban Tool are fab services.

    Reply

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